


Speechless

by suitesamba



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Sick!Sherlock, Stream of Consciousness, canon character death, character death/not J&S, recluse!sherlock
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-11-11
Packaged: 2018-08-28 22:05:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8464729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitesamba/pseuds/suitesamba
Summary: Reunion, recovery, redemption. Minimal dialogue. Alternating points of view. Somewhere in time after TAB.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a collection of short pieces I write in between longer works and projects. Here are the first six, posted this week on my tumblr. More to come.

Sandalwood soap. The television droning on, low volume, two rooms away. Lemon biscuits baking, the scent wafting up the stairway. Music, classical, orchestral, barely there, but always present, filling in the voids, the hollow spaces. Fever, flames licking his bones, burning him from within. 

Gulls crying, haunting the shore.

A great weight pinning him down. Chest can’t rise, eyes won’t open, throat too tight. Struggling for breath. 

Panic.

Sandalwood soap. Muted voices. Cool touch grazing his forehead, fingers stroking his cheek.

Hallucination. No one is there. Cannot be. Self-imposed isolation. His punishment, his reward. 

Lucidity is fleeting, a skip on an old-fashioned record as he opens his eyes to altered realities. Fuzzy and out of focus, shadows and ghosts, remembered voices blurred at the edges.

Someone is playing the violin. The sound haunts the halls of his memories, but he cannot grasp the vaporous wisps as they dance above his head. He chases them with threads of consciousness, loses them in a maze of colours, tires of the chase and sinks into a bed of feathers, an aerie, so far above the earth that gravity loses its grip.

_Sher-lock_ whispers the wind. 

_Sherlock._

ooOOOoo

He steals a moment outside where the stars illuminate the heavens and the sea breeze washes ashore with a salty kiss. He’s slept only in fits and starts for two days. His leg aches, a phantom pain, and he drops into a chair on the cottage porch and rubs his thigh, chasing an ache that isn’t there.

“You didn’t say it aloud, but he’s turned the corner, hasn’t he?”

John puts both hands behind his neck, stretching, and he turns his head only marginally when he answers, speaking to the air beside him.

“I think so. Yes. If he’ll just eat. He’d do better at ….”

“Hospital. I know. And yes, he would. But no. I’m compelled to honour his wishes.”

He sighs, conceding defeat. “Of course.”

The door closes behind him, and he stares upward into star-studded darkness, hating himself for his failures, hating Sherlock Holmes for moving on.

ooOOOoo

The soup is thin and bland, tasteless, tepid, yet he swallows as bidden, spoonful after spoonful. More broth than soup, he thinks, as he teases out the meaning of words. It is more than he wants, less than he needs, and there is no happy medium, no balance, no equilibrium. His limbs are leaden, as if gravity has returned with a vengeance. The fire in his bones has simmered, sputtered, and the burn within has dulled to a heav ache. His head throbs, pulse beating at the temples, and his eyes are closed against the dim light from the shuttered window.

Sometimes, he forgets to swallow.

A flannel dabs at the corner of his mouth, a spoon scrapes against his stubbled jaw. Fingers, light but sure, caress his throat, remind him of the reflexive act his body has forgotten. 

He does not speak. He has nothing to say.

He knows when John is there, when John wields the spoon, the flannel. When the fingers on his wrist, measuring his pulse, are short and strong. When the smell of sandalwood soap lingers in the air, and the words spoken are self-derisive, disbelieving, reproachful. Soft and low, under his breath, secret words for only Sherlock. _Ridiculous man. What were you thinking?_ He listens to John’s measured breathing, counting exhalations, pacing himself to breathe in tandem. _You’ve lived through a lot worse than this, idiot._ A long, long pause. _There are easier ways to kill yourself than malnutrition, Sherlock._

The words sting. The words reassure. He hoards them, to consider later, will let them run through his fingers like pebbles in a streambed. They fall like rain on the roof, and they are manna, replenishing his scant reserves.

ooOOOoo

He wakes from slumber in the thick of darkness, slits open his eyes to dim lamplight. His limbs ache – he wants to turn over, to use the loo, to sit on the porch, feet up on the small table, cigarette burning to ash between his fingers as he catalogues the colours of the sunset, compares them to the diffused light through curtains, dancing on dust motes, at Baker Street.

His eyes, heavily lidded, sleepy still in the quiet nothingness between bedfall and morning tea, settle on the feet on the ottoman. Bare, toes curled against the cold, smaller than his own, utterly, heart-wrenchingly familiar even now.

He swallows against the lump that wells up malignantly in his throat, wills his eyes to close, wills sleep to come again, but his traitorous brain betrays him and his eyes move, following sole to heel, heel to ankle, ankle to calf. Here, the smooth line of worn cotton denim gives way to thick wool, to the hem of a coat, spread out like a quilt, collar tucked beneath heavily stubbled chin.

It is his coat. His old Belstaff. Pushed to the back of the cupboard, interred with the bespoke suits of another man’s life, kept but not used, preserved in a mausoleum of memories.

John stirs in his sleep, shifts, sighs, sinks into the cushions of the chair. If there is a smile on his face, Sherlock cannot see it.

And he cannot see the hole in the coat, a hole the size of a bullet, but he knows it’s there, and cannot imagine John purposefully shrouded in that coat. 

The coat has a story. 

And so does John.

And so, especially, does Sherlock.

ooOOOoo

John studies Sherlock’s hands while he sleeps.

There are twenty-seven bones in the human hand, shaped into a powerful appendage with joints and sinew, tissue and skin. The hand is an anatomical wonder, strong and flexible, capable of the most complex and intricate motion. Carpal, metacarpal, proximal, middle and distal plalanges. Extensors and flexors. A thumb, opposable, versatile. 

The human hand can wield a paintbrush, a shotgun, a chisel, a scalpel. The hand is the instrument of the brain; it has ultimate power, to build, to destroy. 

John has always admired Sherlocks’ hands, his long, dexterous fingers, the way they seem to float above the bow of the violin as he plays, barely touching the polished wood, how they skitter over the keys of the laptop, tap in cascading rhythm on the tabletop. And most particularly, the way they steeple together, under Sherlock’s chin, when he retreats inside of himself, locked in the palatial expanse of that magnificent brain. 

Those hands rest now on the bedclothes, palms up, fingers lax. They are pale, nails neatly trimmed, fingertips calloused from bow and strings.

Sherlock’s hands are clean.

These are the hands, the same hands, that pressed down over the wound in John’s side. Strong, unerring, powerful. Slippery with blood. The hands that held him. The hands that kept death at bay.

The hands that _chose_ him. The hands that saved him. 

That did not waiver as John begged him to save his wife instead.

One set of hands. One life saved.

One.

ooOOOoo

Endless bowls of weak broth are interspersed now with spoonfuls of slippery yogurt, soft, tasteless canned fruit, flavourless bits of cooked eggs. Food would taste better with a candle on the table, plate atop his scattered papers, balanced on the arm of his chair. Better when accompanying the main event, not presented as the show in the center ring.

It is the supporting act, in Sherlock’s mind, upstaged by the presence of John Watson in his bedroom, his home, his refuge. John who wields a spoon like a weapon, mouth set with determination, a thin, disapproving line that mars his careworn face. 

Sherlock knows. He knows John has seen the letter. The directives. His final wishes. Too early, as this is not to be his final bow. But John is here. John is following his wishes to the letter, though inside he is seething. Sherlock knows this, knows all the things John hates. That he is here, in his own home. No fluid drips, no antibiotics, no hospitalizations or medical intervention. John is coaxing nourishment into his body, keeping him warm, and clean, and as comfortable as one can be when the slow slide to the inevitable is forcibly reversed. 

He swallows a sip of water from the cup John holds to his lips. 

_More._

He swallows again. The water is tasteless. Wet nothingness. John is relentless, his voice sickroom soft, even, not angry, not pleased. He is a nurse on hire, results-driven, a taskmaster. Sherlock will eat, will drink, will swallow.

_More._

He is being fattened. Led to a feast of another’s making.

And what is he, exactly? What is he to be?

Prodigal son or lamb for the slaughter?


	2. Part 2

He is well enough to move about the cottage now, the cottage that is too small, too confined for two planets orbiting different suns. 

Or, John thinks, for a cold, lifeless astroid futilely resisting the gravitational pull of an erratic sun.

He watches Sherlock’s every move, mindful of his weakness, protective of the life he’s brought back from the precipice of disaster. 

Because this time – this time – he got there on time.

He catches Sherlock when he stumbles, holds him steady until he has his feet again, then drops his arms and backs away, leaving Sherlock to his own business in the loo but keeping his eye on the door and his heart, raw and bleeding, so tightly locked that no errant beat can surge to the surface, break the skin, slay him like a best friend’s betrayal.

He _hovers_ more than he touches. Watches, alert, more than he intervenes. He allows Sherlock to overtax himself, and cares for him the next day, and the next, as he lies, exhausted, in bed, sipping soup from a mug he holds wrapped in shaking hands.

He stays even when Sherlock is able to bathe himself, to dress himself, to feed himself. 

He is waiting for something – something from Sherlock. Something that is not a thank you, and is not a dismissal. Something that is more than resigned acceptance, and less than a penitent apology.

Gratitude, dismissal, acceptance, apology.

Acknowledgement.

That he came. That he cared. 

That he remembered.

oo88888oo

Sherlock sits stiffly in a chair turned away from the kitchen table and watches John talk with the stranger outside.

Sherlock has pulled himself from bed, legs weak and shaky, throat dry, a vague ache in his stomach. He’d heard voices – John’s quiet murmuring, the calm voice of a doctor, paired with another voice, one unaccustomed to speaking in a sick room. They’d disappeared outside before he’d peeked around the doorframe, and he watches them converse in the yard, and sees John gesture toward the hives.

He swallows a lump in this throat, licks lips parched by sleep. 

The bees.

They don’t need too much care this time of year when flowers are blooming and air is sweet. Honey supers, perhaps, a check for pests, disease. 

John knows nothing about bees, never understood Sherlock’s fascination with them. 

Sherlock wants to trust him now but a swell of doubt rises from his abandoned heart.

John and the man shake hands, and together they walk to the shed. The man disappears inside while Johm turns in place, studies the hives, the garden beyond, and glances back at the house, then out at the garden again. 

The man carries out two supers, stacks them on the ground, then returns for more. In time, he comes out again, fully suited, the smoker – Sherlock’s smoker – in his hand.

John nods, and turns, walks back toward the house. But he stops when he’s at a safe distance, and turns back again to watch the man tend the hives.

Sherlock’s hives.

Sherlock watches John watch the man. Hands in his pockets, leaning against a tree, Sherlock sees him in profile.

He’s aged. Aged beyond the years he’s been away. He was never a spontaneous man, save when Sherlock’s gravitational pull forced him into orbit, but he seems even harder now, careworn, suspicious. 

But he is watching the stranger with poorly concealed interest. Sherlock sees it in the subtle way his eyes move, in how he shifts, straightens his back, then relaxes against the tree. 

And as a smile, faint but transforming, forms on this face of his past, Sherlock remembers a lazy Sunday afternoon, and John carefully working stingers out of his skin, patiently, methodically. Not saying a word. Not even pointing out how utterly stupid it was to try to find the queen in a hive he’d discovered in a hollow tree while searching a wooded copse for a murder weapon.

His gaze wanders to the shelf beside his desk, to the long row of books on beekeeping. To the shelf of journals detailing his year-round observations. 

His current journal is open on his desk.

He doesn’t even remember the last time he used it – the days are fog-rimmed, veiled in gauze. But John has found it, and has found someone to care for the bees.

He blinks back his confusion, his uncertainty, and turns his head to watch the bee man fit a super on the closest hive.

Then he watches John.

Watches John straighten up, stand tall. He takes a fortifying breath, releases it slowly. His hands clench into fists, but before he starts back for the cottage, his lips move, forming words no one can hear. He is giving himself encouragement, Sherlock knows, talking himself into doing something he’d rather not do.

Sherlock knows it is time for words. Words they both can hear.

And he is standing, facing the door, when John enters the cottage.


End file.
